Elon Musk just shared 'the biggest epiphany' he's had this year

In an interview with Y Combinator's Sam Altman, Musk said the
most striking realization came to him while he was overseeing the
engineering of Tesla cars in the company's Fremont, California,
factory.

"The biggest epiphany I've had this year is that what really
matters is the machine that builds the machine, the factory," he
said. "And that this is at least two orders of magnitude harder
than the vehicle itself."

Tesla uses 580 giant
robot arms to assemble the Tesla Model S and Model X cars.
But Musk is focused on automating even more of the manufacturing
process as he looks to ramp up production.

Earlier this year, he said that Tesla was "hell-bent on becoming
the best manufacturer on earth." Considering Tesla has had its
share of production problems, this shift in strategy was no doubt
welcomed by those looking to buy a Tesla vehicle.

However, there's now concern that Tesla's one factory won't be
able to handle the automaker's consumer-friendly Model 3, which
is slated to roll out at the end of 2017 or early 2018, on top of
assembling the Model S and Model X.

My colleague Matt DeBord has gotten into the weeds about this,
pointing out that the Fremont plant has the capacity to
assemble 500,000 vehicles annually, but it's only producing a
fraction of that. Tesla's 2016 goal is to ramp up production to
100,000 cars.

But keep in mind that there are roughly 400,000 preorders at this
point for the Model 3, which is on top of Model S and Model X
production. That's a pretty tall order for Tesla's one factory.

Musk knows he needs to be faster.

"Actually, our speed on the line is incredibly slow," he told
Altman. "I think we are ... in terms of the extra velocity of
vehicles on the line, it's probably about, including both X and
S, it's maybe five centimeters per second. This is very slow."

Musk added that he's "confident" Tesla can get a twentyfold
increase of that speed, but we'll have to wait to see how Model 3
production goes.